Here we go again: Climategate 2.0
From what I've heard, the new release doesn't contain anything more recent than 2009, so it seems likely they were stolen at the same time as the first batch. It smacks more of desperation to me than anything else - they obviously released the cream of the crop with the first batch and as carefully as the Heritage Foundation guy could cherry pick the quotes, I really don't see anything damning in this second release.
For starters, at least 6 independent investigations exonerated the scientists involved in the original emails of any scientific wrongdoing, but several of the investigation reports criticized the scientists for not being sufficiently open. The talk of deleting emails and such is simply more of the same. If there were some 2011 emails mixed in with the batch, it might be worse, because then it would suggest that they're continuing to be overly secretive, but there aren't.
I don't see any smoking guns in the quotes directly relating to science, either, though I'd need to see more context to know for sure. One that stood out as being a particularly misleading example of quote mining was the one on troposphere data. The inadequacy of data on temperature changes in the troposphere is well known and openly discussed, not covered up at all. It's also worth noting that that particular email was from 2005 and referred to the first draft of the 2007 IPCC report, not the final version.
More hilariously, if you read the full email and not just the cherry-picked quote about the figure being "deceptive" and there being "dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC," Wigley appears to be criticizing the creator of the figure (Schmidt, not Mann) and the IPCC for underestimating climate sensitivity, not overestimating it. How convenient that Taylor overlooked that little detail when doing his cherry-picking.
Who is taking anything as gospel? I've been interested in climate science since I was in elementary school and in the intervening 20 years, I've read widely in both pro and anti AGW camps.
"Yes, they diverged, but we still assume they are good for the past."
We don't "assume," we have corroborating evidence.
"Wasn't it 2012 when the polar caps would be completely melted and we'd be under 100 feet of water?"
Actually, as recently as 2007 most scientists thought the Arctic wouldn't be ice free in summer until 2100. Since the observed melting has dramatically outpaced the IPCC's predictions, the date is now estimated to arrive in the 2020's or 2030's. I've seen predictions for an ice-free Arctic summer by both 2012 and 2015, but they are outliers. (Though, technically, they have not yet been proven wrong.) I have not seen any serious scientific prediction claiming that the entire polar ice cap would be gone by 2012 and sea levels would be 100 feet higher, and would be most interested to see where you have. Honestly, it sounds more like something you got from Hollywood, or else just made up yourself in an attempt to make climate scientists sound ridiculous.
"our esteemed researchers don't have original copies of most data sets."
Citation?
"The reason they released more emails is because they have several hundred thousand of them, so they try to release the most relevant ones."
If that's what you want to believe.
"As for the troposphere, I'm not sure which email you are referring to as there are more than one."
Peter Thorne's: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary."
"Really, I don't even care to read through them all. I've looked at the temperature data sets, and interestingly enough, it's always the worst ones that are published widely. All of the projections have been shown to be wrong already, seeing as we are at nearly 0, instead of the 1-1.5 we were supposed to be at."
Speaking of temperature data sets, have you been able to get at the BEST data set yet? It's working for me: http://berkeleyearth.org/data.php
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